With a face that belongs either on Mount Rushmore or one of the higher-denomination US Treasury banknotes, Tommy Lee Jones has for 40 years been the saviour of more movies than I can count. That includes this week's listless, though occasionally diverting, historical drama Emperor, in which he essays the role of General Douglas MacArthur with far greater conviction and aplomb than pretty-boy Gregory Peck managed for US TV back in 1977, or Henry Fonda the year before, or Laurence Olivier in the Moonie-backed megaflop Inchon in 1981.

Although his is a supporting role – the lead is whey-faced, pasteurised Matthew Fox as his protege, General Bonner Fellers – and Jones is only in about six scenes, it's his work that sticks with the viewer. The movie, which is about the process by which the emperor Hirohito was exonerated of direct responsibility for Japanese war crimes, the better to maintain civic order during the postwar US occupation, sputters to life mostly when Jones's general is around. And, as usual, this MacArthur has an awful lot in common with TLJ: that commanding bark, the grouchiness and surly demeanour, hedged about with shorthand props such as the ridiculous corncob pipe and the lived-in uniform. And just when you start thinking Jones is phoning it in, he slams you with a soft-spoken, expertly judged scene like his climactic encounter with the hitherto unseen Hirohito, and you remember that he's still the showstopper he always was.

He always has been. Although I treasure his work as Thaddeus Stevens in Lincoln – after D-Day, he's the best thing in it, born to deliver Stevens's oratorical invective – it's his early work that I've always admired the most. Time has slowed him down, but in his youth Jones was absolutely galvanising in movie after movie. His dead-eyed Gary Gilmore in The Executioner's Song is a chilling creation, and I've never forgotten the murder spree that culminates with the camera on TLJ's vacant, stony face as he bends over his last victim and empties his gun into him. A couple of years later he was Doolittle Lynn, Loretta's wayward boozehound husband, in Coal Miner's Daughter. One night, at home while Loretta's on tour, Dooley picks up the phone to hear a distraught fan wanting advice from her idol. Jones's slow transformation from irritated redneck to utterly kind and sensitive counsellor is extraordinarily deft and moving.

But my favourite of all is his turn as Coley Blake, escaped convict in 1976's Jackson County Jail. It ends on a freeze-frame of Jones shot down by crooked cops in the middle of a small-town Bicentennial parade, bleeding all over the Stars and Stripes, and next to the word STOP painted on the asphalt, a vivid tableau that somehow says all you need to know about the emperor Jones.